At any rate, according to my aunts, she went from mildly forgetful to wandering lost and naked in the street, so they moved her into memory care as soon as feasible. Fortunately, she has the assets for one of the nicer private care homes that treats the residents well.
She asks about people who died long ago, but not about her children. Judging from the reported conversations, her memories go to age 19 or 20, before she had kids, but after she married my dad. She is absolutely terrified of her (deceased) sister Jane now, so I won’t visit her, because she always told me I reminded her of Jane. I don’t want that kind of outburst to be my last memory of her, nor do I want to terrorize her if she’s so frightened of Jane.
For some reason, I thought I’d have a choice about saying goodbye to my mother. But our last conversation was a year ago, when she called me on my birthday, not sure who I was, but my birthday showed up on her phone, so she called me. It was a strange, stilted conversation, so finding out a year later that she’s in memory care is not surprising. My aunts didn’t believe me about how bad she’d gotten. Denial is a way of life in my family!
She was an amazing home cook, and no one ever left her table hungry, no matter how complicated their diet or how last minute they showed up. She baked and decorated the most gorgeous, decadent birthday cakes I’ve ever eaten. What she could do with buttercream, cream cheese, whipped frosting, and food dye was incredible. All of her desserts were amazing. Except cookies. She never could bake cookies correctly. Oh, and costumes! She made amazing Halloween costumes. She hated sewing, but she was a decent sewist.
My feelings are complicated this weekend. She spent her entire life looking for something she never found, and now she never will. I am sad that she is so confused and paranoid, as I am when I find out anyone is going through dementia, but I’m not sorry the person who was my mother is effectively gone. Her life has been a tragedy since conception, (she was conceived as a “replacement” son for her dying brother), and everything went downhill from there. She deserved better. We all did.